


the one-two step

by preromantics



Category: White Collar
Genre: Multi, Pre-Relationship, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-30
Updated: 2010-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:05:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preromantics/pseuds/preromantics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal convinces El and Peter to go out dancing. <i>"We took lessons together for the wedding," Elizabeth says.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the one-two step

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 7/01/10.

"We took lessons together for the wedding," Elizabeth says. She's drying a dish, still in her heels, and she barely turns her face back to Neal when she says it, but he catches her smile.

"And they were a disaster," Peter says, with a tone Neal thinks is supposed to be finality. He's not going to give up, though. 

"There is a club --" Neal starts.

"Oh, great," Peter says, cutting him off. He grabs a dish from El as he says it, leaning up to stack it in the cupboard automatic, and Neal takes a second to smile at the domesticity of it, even though he doesn't mean to. 

Neal, does, though, roll his eyes when Peter turns to him. "It's a high class club," Neal says, "you can just go have drinks, but everyone dances. You can take private lessons, too."

Neal personally loves Friday nights there, when it's not loud like Saturdays but it's still alive, people moving out on the dance floor, fine Salsa dancers from other countries and people who know every turn of the Viennese waltz like they know their own heartbeat. It took a long time for Neal to learn to dance, and he hasn't been able to dance with -- people he enjoys, or, something -- in many years. 

"We can't," Peter says, placing the last dish in the cabinet in front of him with Elizabeth hands it to him. 

El turns at the same time and dries her hands on the dishtowel next to the sink before she rubs them together, once. "Yes, we can," she says, although she's looking at Neal and not Peter, smiling. 

Neal grins back and extends a hand out across the space between them and straightens from where he'd been leaning against the counter top. "Good," he says. "Dance with me."

Peter makes a noise to the side of them, probably because he knows he's about to be out-ruled is going to have to go dancing, and Neal doesn't mind. He wants to watch them dance together at the club. He wants to teach them, go to one of the studios in the back and act as their private instructor. Dance with them both and lean back against the mirrors as they find their footing together. 

El's hand is soft and warm from the sink when Neal wraps his fingers around, pulling her close in a spin. She laughs, head tilted back, and Neal wraps his other arm around her, stepping them back with an imaginary rhythm, a sort of imaginary waltz step. He leads them back and forth while he laughs to the other side of the kitchen, against the sink, and then across to where Peter is standing.

When Neal looks up at him, passing El over into his chest, Peter's lips are, somewhat reluctantly, turned up at the corners. 

"Watch your hands, Caffrey, that's my wife," Peter says, after a pause, even though Neal has already taken his hands from El's waist.

El leans forward -- they are close, at least in the space the kitchen affords -- and adjusts the way Neal's tie rests under his throat. He doesn't mean to, but it catches him off guard, and he breathes in a little too quickly, shuts his eyes. 

"Don't worry about his hands," El says, turning back, leaning up on the front of her heels to press her lips against Peter's cheek. "Worry about mine." She laughs with it, and spins, once, out of the kitchen. 

"I'll bring your shoes down," she calls, halfway up the stairs. 

"I don't know why I'm doing this," Peter says, and Neal, for a moment, can't figure out if he should step closer to him or take a step back, the space between them that Elizabeth had occupied barely a foot. He steps back, instead, and extends a hand out to Peter, mostly as a joke, grinning wide.

"You'll enjoy it," he says. 

Peter hesitates, rolls his eyes and then, to Neal's surprise -- even, after all this time, with Neal having mapped out so much of Peter's personality, how he sits when he's tired, when he's alert, how he folds into the car after a case ends, his hands light on the wheel -- takes Neal's outstretched hand.

"Even you can't fix the fact I have two left feet," Peter says, as Neal pulls him forward, settles his other hand along Peter's waist, against the folds in his button-up. Neal knows Peter doesn't have two left feet; he's seen him dance undercover, and he remembers watching Peter and El dancing years ago, watching them in the same restaurant just to see what Peter was like, how the man who was trying so hard to catch him lived, how he ticked. (He had been surprised at the ease which Peter had held Elizabeth, how outside the restaurant they had kissed like they had only been together a few months, rather than married a handful of years -- deep.)

Neal walks him back as he did with El, an imaginary step, a one-two beat that almost seems like it exists out loud. They dance, although it's more like walking in time, together through past the dining room and into the living room, Peter's hand flexing under Neal's, warm and dry. 

Elizabeth finds them like that, coming down the stairs, and she pauses, Peter's shoes hanging from her hand. "You're --" she says, and then doesn't seem to know what to say as Neal steps away from Peter, watching the distinct way that Peter's hands flex and curl against his side for a minute. El laughs, lightly. 

"We should go," Neal says. "We'll have more time."

"We have the whole night," Peter says, even though he looks a little surprised to have said it, and Neal grins at him and then at El.

"Good," El says, and they all stand there for a second before moving at once, Neal for his hat, Peter for his jacket, and El for her purse, ready.

  
  
  



End file.
